Swaying Silhouettes
by CholeraInTheTimeOfLove
Summary: One woman, finding herself pushed to the brink of insanity and holed up in a barn on the edge of oblivion, realizes that she is not the only one left. Enter emotionally detached Daryl Dixon, dealing with the crushing uncertainty of his brother's fate and the desperation of a man lost and alone. The Walking Dead, Early Season 3. Language/Adult Situations/Poss. Smut. OFC/Daryl Dixon
1. Dawn

On a frosty mid-Winter morning, an unusual humidity floated stagnant in the air. The sun was moments from peeking above the eastern horizon, a few pale lavender clouds drifting lazily across the Georgian sky. A woman rolled over in her makeshift bed of flannel blankets and straw, her vision blurry as she blinked her eyes open. The blue light of the early day was wafting in around the edges of the heavy woolen horse blanket that was tacked in place above the east-facing window in the loft above. She poked a sleepily awkward pair of fingers into her already throbbing temples and forced her aching body into sitting position, curling her legs beneath her. Her jaw opened into a wide yawn as she wrenched herself upwards, staggering towards the boarded up windows which prevented light, amongst other less desirable things, from getting in. She leaned forward and pressed an eye socket against the space between two boards, squinting into the early light of the day. The woman saw nothing but open space, tall grasses and the swaying silhouettes of the damned, standing in stark shadowy contrast to the bright pinks and oranges that were gradually illuminating the sky. She drowsily staggered towards the ladder that would take her into the loft of the aged barn in which she had hunkered down. She hefted herself onto the rickety old thing, placing one hand and one foot over the other with a deftness that she found surprising for how sleepily she had awoken this morning. She climbed a few rungs higher than the level of the loft, then swung herself down onto the floorboards using the rafters overhead. She landed with a soft, dusty thump and then moved over to the open loft window. She could see for a few miles from her lonely perch; from the sagging remains of Atlanta all foggy and distant, to the nearby correctional facility, peeking out from above the tops of pine trees with tired cement walls.

Cat had been alone at the end of the world for months now, holed up in a barn that had once belonged to her grandparents. But they had shot themselves dead in their living room before the apocalypse even had a chance to gobble them up. Cat still hadn't quite decided if she pitied or envied their fate. Her bare, calloused feet padded quietly over to the edge of the floor and she squatted down, swinging her legs out to dangle along the weather-worn face of the barn. Slouching so hard it almost seemed she was inviting her mother to rise up out of the grave – she should really start rethinking what metaphors she used, even if in thought – Cat began to scan the horizons with sharp green eyes. Just as every other morning, nothing seemed entirely out of place in the surrounding fields of weedy grass. Cat had completed her scan of the immediate fields and moved on to the gnarled and nigh impassible tree line that began about three miles from where she sat. The stillness of the morning finally settled in on her as she realized that, just like every other morning from the previous year, no catalyst existed to foster any sorts of change in her newfound form of existence. The only thing that remained as an influence in her life was the wheel of death, constantly rolling forward and leaving everything crushed in its wake.

Cat was absentmindedly sweeping her eyes over the tree line once more, her sclera shrouded beneath a furrowed brow when she caught the far-off rustling of a pair of blackberry bushes. Her eyes hovered intently over the spot at which she swore she saw something. Just as she was about to write it off as one of those shit-brained beasts screwing around in the underbrush, Cat caught the glint of something hard and metallic, and in no way fleshy and rotted. Without realizing it, Cat had brought herself into a standing position and was leaning perilously far over the edge of the barn window, straining against herself to get a better look at what was fighting with the plants on the edge of her territory. It was then that she finally caught enough contiguous lines in the brush to make out a scope. At that moment, a cool and sharp breeze whipped past her right ear, prompting Cat to brush away what she thought was a fly. It wasn't until she heard the sharp _thok_ in the wood behind her and the subsequent wobbling noises that followed that Cat finally realized that the bolt of a crossbow had been fired into the general vicinity of her face.

To be continued...

Chapter one of a story that I have no idea where I'm going with.

Please review n shit.


	2. Inhale

Innumerable stars freckled the early morning sky, the far eastern horizon beginning to glimmer with the vague suggestion of the impending dawn. The majority of the sky was still black through the layers of wide fan leaves and skinny pine needles overhead, and the faint scent of burning tobacco slinked through the light mist that clung low to the trunks of the trees. Inky darkness enveloped the forest, a thick blanketing of decaying leaves acting as a sound-dampening carpet. The sly round ember of a lit cigarette blinked in the blackness, and through the eerie silence one could make out the unmistakable crackling of the tobacco alighting. The shadow of a man squatted beside the puddle of another, an overwhelming stench of rot and ooze emanating from the spot. The living man had the cigarette curled into his hand, loosely clutched between his forefinger and thumb. He stared with tired eyes at nothing in particular, making a respectable attempt at enjoying the rare find that was an in-tact pack of cigarettes and crinkling his brows together in the process.

"Fucking hipsters,"

He growled with a gravelly voice, inhaled one more ragged and hasty drag, and mashed the lit end of the cigarette into the moist ground before he had smoked it even half of the way to the filter. Before extending his legs and standing upright, he considered the light blue pack of Marlboro Smooths once more before tossing it to rest on the tattered remains of what must have once been expensive clothes upon the corpse he had recently incapacitated. Daryl lifted a hand to push a greasy lock of hair back and out of his eyes, and as he stood up he was trying to wrap his head around the appeal of mentholated cigarettes.

"The fuck would ya wanna smoke fuckin' toothpaste,"

He trailed off, his incoherently soft words spoken to no one but the vacant bodies that were scattered around his little portion of the Georgia wilderness. Between the nagging voice in his head that sounded entirely too much like his big brother and the restlessness of having hunkered down at the prison for a while now, Daryl had found sleep unattainable throughout the past few hours; he had let himself silently out the main prison gate well before the day had begun, his only real companion slung snugly over his back and resting between two tensed shoulder blades. Before moving on, he leaned over the cadaver, mutilated by decomposition, and wrenched the aluminum bolt out from the walker's nasal cavity. Daryl plucked a generously-sized leaf from a nearby tree branch and used it to wipe the stink from the shaft of the bolt. He dropped the soiled leaf on the ground and looked at the bolt's faint glow in the thumbnail-moon-lit morning and then slid it back into its home in the quiver that hung next to his crossbow behind him. As he strode away from where the prison loomed brooding and cold, he straightened the colorful poncho he wore over his coat, his pistol holster repositioning itself to properly rest on the crest of his left hip bone. Daryl had heard the dry rasping of the walker long before he could locate it visually through the darkness. In the beginning, it had been easier to smell the walkers coming from further away, with their bodies decaying so rapidly. But at this stage in the game, so much of the world was rotting all at once that it became impossible to use scent to locate the bastards. Once he had found the walker, staggering on flinty legs about two hundred feet into the woods away from the prison, it had only been a matter of aligning it in his sights and releasing the bolt to fling headlong into his target. Daryl had begun walking again, although to where he had no inclination.

As the sun commenced its flamboyant entrance into the day, Daryl had made his way to a thicker part of the woods. The underbrush here was heavy, which translated to a lower likelihood of running into a walker, but also a rougher time getting away from any he encountered. He bet on his chances and picked his way through the brambles, feeling like he was coming towards a break in the trees ahead. He came upon a big pair of blackberry bushes, and his eye caught a particularly plump berry, winking with dew and nestled within the heart of one of the bushes. He leaned forward, stretching his arm far into the bush and snatching the berry up, his arm hastily recoiling. He lost himself for a moment as he greedily sucked the juice from the blackberry, and as he did, his wandering eyes caught an unnaturally large red shape through the brush. He blinked rapidly a few times in succession, then squinted through a gnarl of branches and sticks. Exceptionally clearly, he saw a barn across a small open space from where he hid, and the shape of a person standing in the barn's loft window. Despite his concealment in the brush, he could feel that this person had their eyes right on him. He acted without thinking, and wrenched his crossbow around and up into firing position. As he did, he focused his sight through the scope along the top of the weapon and saw the face of a woman. He looked at her, saw her eyes were green and her coffee-brown hair had been cut very short, and even made out a few freckles across her cheeks. Daryl exhaled, and then fired a shot.

thus completes chapter two. expect another post within the next few hours here, i'm actively working on where the story of these two is going.

review n shit.


	3. Dust

When the wavering of the crossbow bolt came to a stop, Cat finally understood what was happening to her and instantly dropped to the floor on her belly, disturbing a thick cloud of dust. She coughed twice as she crawled towards the ladder that would take her down onto the barn floor, the small dirt and hay particles irritating her throat. As she scrambled down the ladder, she frantically tried to think of what her next move should be, however she found it quite difficult to navigate through her turbulent mind, which was now thick with the bewilderment that another living person was in her immediate vicinity. Cat kept finding herself getting excited until she reminded herself that this person also had tried to shoot her.

"Barn or basement, barn or basement,"

Cat chanted to herself, trying to hurriedly decide where she should hide herself before whoever this was made their way to the barn doors. As she landed on the hay-laden wooden panels of the barn floor, she spun around to lunge towards the rusted pickaxe that hung on a peg in the stall where she slept, and in the process snagged her worn jeans on a nail that jutted out from a support beam. She growled at herself in frustration, unhooked her pants from the twisted nail, and wrapped her grasping fingers around the handle of her pickaxe. As she whirled towards the steps that led towards the basement, she froze in thought. "BARN OR BASEMENT?" she demanded of herself, her eyes darting around from a handful of hiding spots on the current level, then back to the door that led to the cellar. Cat had finally convinced herself that fleeing belowground was her best move and lifted her right leg to make her way towards the gaping mouth in the floor of the barn that led downwards when her ears alerted her to the faint but unmistakably present sound of rhythmic footsteps fast approaching. She quickly and quietly placed her bare big toe back on the floor first, and gradually worked the rest of her foot down from there. Once she was in a steady standing position she began to cautiously squat down, her knees creaking audibly. Cat's fingertips found the floor as the footsteps became impossibly close, and the tall shadow of a man clamored up in front of the barn door. She lowered herself down onto her hands and knees, her pickaxe clutched in her left fist, and crept backwards into her stall, only disturbing a few wayward pieces of straw with the tip of the axe as she went. Cat had finally concealed the whole of her body behind the wall of her stall, but peeked the edge of her brow and one of her eyes around the corner of the wall, locked on the shadow that was leaning into her barn.

"I saw ya," the man informed her as he gave the door a pair of solid pounds, his accent thick and Southern. "How many o' ya are in there?" He demanded.

Cat shuddered sheepishly at the sound of another human voice, awash in a sudden and surprising wave of cold uneasiness. This guy freaked her the fuck out, regardless of who he was or what he wanted of her. The shock of encountering her first living human being in months had subsided for a brief moment, and the survival instincts she had spent this whole time honing finally kicked in. Cat took a swift breath in through her lips, and softly raised herself up into a crouching position, still hidden behind the stall's wall. Testing the weight of the pickaxe in her left hand, she bounced her arm up and down in a controlled motion, feeling her weapon's center of gravity. She kept her eye on the man as he began to pace for a few steps in either direction in front of the door. During one of the brief moments he had his back turned to her while he was pacing, she thanked her lucky stars that she was barefoot and floated on her toes around the wall and through the open space between the stall and the barn's outer wall. Once she had reached her destination, Cat pressed the back of her body up against the wall, the cotton fibers of her thin gray t-shirt ruminating over snagging on the many splinters that peppered the wooden wall. She was still perched on the balls of her feet, balancing on her toes as she took infinitesimal steps along the wall, being careful not to kick up any dust or breathe too loudly. She was sidling up to the hinge of the closest barn door, and as she pressed an eye up to the space between, she saw that the gap afforded her a generous view of this strange, country-sounding man that had come a-knocking.

It looked like he was wearing some kind of crazy-colored Mexican poncho, although what really caught her attention about his appearance was the powerful-looking crossbow he held absentmindedly in the hand closest to Cat, his other hand shielding his right eye from light as he pressed his face up to the door and attempted get himself a look of what lie inside the barn. She looked above the point where she was standing in the barn and saw a horizontal plank of wood nailed down between two support beams about a foot in front and three feet overhead. She hooked her pickaxe onto the board and left it there, rocked back on her heels for a moment, then kicked forward on her toes, lifting silently off the ground and latching onto the support beam with both hands. She didn't give her body the time to swing there, but instead curled herself up into a ball, inverted herself, and then hooked her legs over the edge of the plank. She pulled herself upwards so she was sitting upright, then placed each foot along the length of the plank and stood up from there. From that point it was an easy climb onto the loft floor just a few feet above, and the piles of dust that Cat usually found annoying now proved themselves quite useful when she needed her every sound to be muffled. She picked up her pickaxe by the head and reached forward, anchoring the palm of one hand on the loft floor and using the other to slide the axe up ahead of her. Once the axe was settled up there, Cat prepared to grab onto the floorboards and hoist herself, but before she did, she granted the strange man's shadow one last inquisitive glance. It looked like he had stepped a few inches back from the door, but was still standing outside, waiting or looking for what she couldn't tell. Cat then gave a hearty flex of her biceps and upper-back muscles and pulled the rest of her body onto the loft floor. As she did so, the denim fabric of her pants created a distinct zipping noise, and when she arrived on the upper floor in a half-squat, half-crouch, her heart stopped in her throat. She was convinced that she had given herself away, however she could make out the top of his head, turned away and looking across the field, through a large gap where the wall was missing a few boards before her.

The sun had already made up a decent chunk of its ascension by the time Cat had crept over to lie on the loft floor against the wall, looking with both eyes through the large gap at the man that seemed to now be staking out her main entryway, not that she had even opened that door within the last few months. Cat lie in waiting, breathing in shallow wisps and picking apart this man's every move until the sun rose perilously close to high noon, although the winter season still kept the sun relatively low. After what seemed like an eternity of watching and waiting and deciphering, the man turned around and walked back the way he came. This was Cat's chance! She gave the man in the poncho one last look before she moved towards the hole in the upper wall and went through the hole feet first, shimmying her lean but underfed body down to hang by her free hand as her other hand pulled the pickaxe through the hole behind her. She measured the distance of the fall below her then slipped down.

Before the man could notice her, she swiftly crouched down and faded into the cover of the high grasses and proceeded to stalk him like a lioness, her pickaxe readied and held at her hip, although what she was planning on doing with it was still a mystery to her. She kept her distance but stayed close enough to keep an intent eye on his movements, a few feet behind him and a few more off to his right. Without warning the man slowed his pace, which had been deliberate and quick before. As he decelerated, he started to look around him as though he were sensing that Cat had been tailing him. She stopped in her tracks, instinctively digging her toes into the soft dirt, made red by the sheer amount of clay in it. The man then stopped completely, turning his head so his brown hair fell in a heavy, greasy mop over his dark, squinted and discerning eyes. It was at that point that Cat's instincts took over fully and without even thinking, she stood bolt upright, her pickaxe hanging limp and useless at her side. All of her intents for this man, malicious or otherwise, were muted in her mind, and her mouth opened to speak without her permission. After all this time alone, there was one thing she needed from this man desperately, more than anything else he could offer her. She needed something static and concrete and real to latch on to, to bring her back into some semblance of reality. The man and Cat locked eyes on each other for a painfully long and intense moment. Her voice came out as a desperate and mouse-like rasp, and her expression fell into a harrowed desperation. Before the words croaked out she let pass a soft sigh, like a death rattle, then told him,

"Please…Tell me your name."

this concludes chapter three, and also brings us one step closer to whatever the fuck is gonna happen between these two. expect another post within the next couple of days.

review n shit

also, apologies for the disparity between the lengths of each chapter. it all just kinda comes out of me, i don't really have a say in where it begins and at what point it ends. hope you're enjoying this so far.

Hey guys. I apologize for being a little absentee lately, but I have definitely been working on the progression of the story. Expect a new chapter by tomorrow night.


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